DDT
tlambert | April 14, 2007Glenn Reynolds endorses a post by John Berlau who accuses environmentalists of making racist comments like Don Imus. Berlau gives five examples and Berlau is deceptive in each and every one of them. Environmentalists must be completely non-racist if Berlau can't make a case without resorting to quote doctoring.
The most outrageous environmentalist comment Berlau offers is this:
Charles Wurster, co-founder and former chief scientist of Environmental Defense Fund (now Environmental Defense):
When asked about human deaths that would result from the banning of DDT, due to exposure to more…
tlambert | April 14, 2007The Durban Mercury reports:
South African medical researchers have reported alarming evidence of low sperm counts and other damage to the male reproductive system linked to the use of the pesticide DDT in anti-malaria spray campaigns.
Professor Tiaan de Jager, project leader and co-author of the study, told The Mercury on Wednesday that there was now sufficient evidence for the department of health to be concerned about the health impacts of DDT and to consider moving towards safer alternative methods for malaria control.
De Jager and fellow researchers from the University of Pretoria's…
tlambert | March 8, 2007Alex catches Dominic Lawson spreading the DDT ban myth. Lawson is the brother-in-law of Christopher Monckton who also spead the myth.
tlambert | February 22, 2007The Wall Street Journal editorial board is infamous for their reckless disregard of the evidence for global warming. They've just published an op-ed by Pete Du Pont which manages to get pretty well every single factual claim wrong. As with most of these things, correcting every single false claim would result in a post about five times as long as the original piece, so I will just do some of the more egregious ones.
Solar radiation is reducing Mars's southern icecap, which has been shrinking for three summers despite the absence of SUVS and coal-fired electrical plants anywhere on the Red…
tlambert | January 30, 2007Via Ian Hart I find Paul Driessen in the Washington Times offering alarmist claims that action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would be economic suicide. We see how important the DDT ban myth is to these folks:
It's a classic bait-and-switch tactic, repeated endlessly by activists, scientists, journalists, bureaucrats, celebrities and politicians. They used similar tactics 35 years ago to excise DDT and other insecticides from disease control programs.
Tens of millions died from malaria -- and none of the perpetrators have ever apologized, admitted error or been held accountable for the…
tlambert | January 8, 2007Allan Schapira writes a letter to the Lancet
DDT: a polluted debate in malaria control
A recent press statement from WHO about dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and indoor residual spraying for malaria control [1] caused a considerable stir, despite the fact that, in terms of policy, it merely re-iterated WHO's endorsement of DDT as a useful insecticide for malaria control, albeit in a highly promotional way. In this recurring debate, arguments for and against DDT, as before, have been heated and mainly based on considerations far removed from the realities of malaria control.
That's…
tlambert | December 17, 2006Brent Herbert debunks some myths about bedbugs and DDT:
Since I discovered that I have bed bugs I have been touring around the internet doing research right from day one and what I have discovered is that the media is doing a terrible job of covering the bed bug story, and as a result many of the bed bug blogs I have read are full of misinformation which echoes this bad reporting in the media. One of the most common themes in the media stories you will read if you do a search for news articles on bed bugs is that we have bed bugs because DDT was banned, thus forcing us to use 'weak chemicals…
tlambert | November 30, 2006Bjorn Lomborg interviewed by TCS Daily says:
The use of DDT is probably the best example of this and its use in the third world was badly mismanaged. DDT is not dangerous to humans, but it is dangerous to some animals. So if you're in a rich country where you have malaria under control, clearly you should ban DDT or severely restrict its use.
But our concern about DDT in the early 70s basically meant that most of the developing world restricted their use as well. That was probably an immensely bad judgement because yes, it harms animals like birds, but it also saves human lives. These…
tlambert | November 11, 2006Christopher Monckton's attempt to debunk anthropogenic global warming was fulloferrors.
In a follow-up article he only corrects three of them, and even makes another error in his correction.
Last week I said that James Hansen had told the United States Congress that sea level would rise several feet by 2000, but it was the US Senate, and by 2100; I added a tautologous "per second" to "watts per square metre"; and I mentioned the perhaps apocryphal Arctic voyage of Chen Ho.
No, adding "per second" is not tautologous -- it's wrong. "Watts per square metre per second" is a measure of how…
tlambert | October 6, 2006Tina Rosenberg has an extremely misleading article in the New York Times touting DDT as a magic bullet against malaria. The give away in such articles is the way the author never mentions resistance to DDT. Here's the only mention of resistance:
Throughout Africa, until recently, countries were using chloroquine to cure malaria, a medicine that cost pennies, and so could be bought by rural families. But mosquitoes had become resistant to it.
This isn't even correct. The malaria parasite, not mosquitoes, has become resistant to chloroquine.
Rosenberg's failure to mention resistance is…
tlambert | October 2, 2006Jeff Dorchen comments on the DDT astroturf crew:
Of course, if you are psychotically averse to government policies, I suppose you might be deluded into thinking Rachel Carson, a zoologist who wrote a book on the environmental risks of chemical pesticides, was a mass murderer. But you would still be delusional. A sick, delusional person trying to smear, by extension, the entire sphere of activity and study known as "environmentalism." You are saying, "Thousands and thousands of scientists, activists and policy-makers are all just a bunch of irresponsible mass-murderers!" Now is that something…
tlambert | September 26, 2006Chris White who is the Malaria Programme Leader with the African Medical and Research Foundation (Amref) responds to the new WHO malaria policy:
The World Health Organisation's new stance on DDT, yet again only goes to show how so many in the West throw out opinions without really understanding the context or culture of Africa. ...
For effective control of mosquitoes, at least 80 per cent of all households must be covered every 6-12 months by well-coordinated spray teams. Is this possible in Africa? Imagine trying that across the Congo basin! It is not realistic to assume that this will…
tlambert | September 25, 2006Gary Becker and Richard Posner have written a pair of posts about DDT and there is much wrong with what they have written.
Becker writes:
The world Trade Organization (WTO) declared in 1998 a "war on malaria" that aimed to cut malaria deaths in half by 2010. Instead, deaths from malaria have been increasing, not falling. The reason for the failure of this malaria war is mainly that in the name of environmentalism, the WTO and other international organizations rejected the use of an effective technique, namely spraying DDT on the walls of homes in malaria-infected areas.
It was the World…
tlambert | September 24, 2006Jessie Stone, who runs a malaria education, prevention and treatment program in Uganda, comments in the New York Times on the WHO's DDT pushing.
To many of us in the malaria-control business, it came as no great surprise last week when the World Health Organization recommended wider use of DDT in Africa to combat the mosquitoes that cause the disease, which kills more than a million people a year, most of them children in Africa.
The W.H.O.'s endorsement of DDT for spraying inside houses has the support of Congress and the Bush administration. With the W.H.O.'s encouragement, several African…
tlambert | September 19, 2006The New York Times reports:
Dr. Kochi said the most substantive change in the W.H.O.'s guidelines on the use of insecticides would extend the reach of the strategy. Until now, the agency had recommended indoor spraying of insecticides in areas of seasonal or episodic transmission of malaria, but it now also advocates it where continuous, intense transmission of the disease causes the most deaths.
Dr. Kochi's new policies and abrasive style have stirred the small world of malaria experts. Dr. Allan Schapira, a senior member of the W.H.O. malaria team who most recently oversaw its approach to…
tlambert | August 14, 2006I've stated before that folks who peddle the DDT ban myth tend to be those who don't believe in evolution and hence don't believe that mosquitoes can evolve resistance to DDT. One or two commenters felt that I was trying to tar those folks with the creationist brush.
Jonathan Sarfati was Andrew Bolt's source for his nonsense about bedbugs and DDT and also showed up in comments to accuse greens of banning DDT to "solve" the overpopulation problem. Jonathan Sarfati is a Young Earth Creationist. Using a sockpuppet named Socrates he wrote:
In some cases, insects required resistance, and…
tlambert | August 9, 2006Jake Young reports that bedbugs are back.
Andrew Bolt naturally blames greens: "Being green can make you itchy", because:
Before World War II, bedbug infestations were common in the U.S., but they were virtually eradicated through improvements in hygiene and the widespread use of DDT in the 1940s and 1950s...
Bolt thinks that the DDT ban in the US caused bedbugs to return. He's wrong, and it's the sort of mistake that people who don't believe in evolution make.
Here's what the World Health Organization says about bedbug control:
Houses with heavy infestations need to be treated with long-…
tlambert | August 1, 2006Yes, the DDT ban myth is back, this time in "DDT Returns" by Apoorva Mandavilli that reads like a press release by DDT advocacy group Africa Fighting Malaria. It's in Nature Medicine of all places and is subscription only, but because I'll be quoting the bits that are wrong or misleading you'll see most of it:
After decades of being marginalized as a dangerous pesticide, DDT--short for dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro ethane--is set to be reintroduced into countries that have tried, and failed, to win the fight against malaria.
On 2 May, the United States Agency for International Development (…
tlambert | June 29, 2006A NY Times article on Arata Kochi, new chief of the World Health Organization's global malaria program wrongly stated that DDT was banned and had to be corrected:
An article in Science Times on Tuesday, profiling Dr. Arata Kochi, the new chief of the World Health Organization's campaign against malaria, referred imprecisely to the pesticide DDT, which can kill the mosquitoes that spread the disease. Its use has been banned in many countries for environmental reasons; it has not been withdrawn entirely.
Kochi is shaking things up in the WHO anti-malaria effort:
In January, he attacked the…
tlambert | May 27, 2006Several days ago I described how the World Bank's Booster Program and Attaran et al both misunderstood an article published by Akhavan, Musgrove, Abrantes, and Gusmao. Since then, the World Bank has corrected the error while Attaran, even though his mistake has been drawn to his attention, has not. Instead, he has accused Akhavan et al of fraud
The bank has always played fast and loose with science. In The Lancet, we revealed how the bank in the 1990s published a scientific paper containing false epidemiological statistics that claimed it reduced malaria in Brazil. The bank's internal…